The President Was Not Encouraging’: What Obama Really Thought About Biden

 

POLITICO

The way Joe Biden explained it on the campaign trail in Iowa, he and his friend Barack Obama had long talked of Biden succeeding him in the White House, continuing the work of their administration. It was only tragic fate, in the form of the loss of his son Beau, that intervened. Now, after four years, the plan could finally go forward, with Biden running as the administration’s true heir.

Barack Obama, Biden solemnly declared in his campaign announcement in Philadelphia, is “an extraordinary man, an extraordinary president.” On the social media-generated #BestFriendsDay, the campaign posted a picture of “Joe” and “Barack” friendship bracelets. Biden relabeled himself an “Obama-Biden Democrat.”

But behind all the BFF bonhomie is a much more complicated story—one fueled by the misgivings the 44th president had about the would-be 46th, the deep hurt still felt among Biden’s allies over how Obama embraced Hillary Clinton as his successor, and a powerful sense of pride that is driving Biden to prove that the former president and many of his aides underestimated the very real strengths of his partner.

“He was loyal, I think, to Obama in every way in terms of defending and standing by him, even probably when he disagreed with what Obama was doing,” recalled Leon Panetta, Obama’s secretary of Defense. “To some extent, [he] oftentimes felt that that loyalty was not being rewarded.”

Next week, Barack and Michelle Obama are each headlining different days of Biden’s convention, a lineup meant to display party unity and a smooth succession from its most popular figure to its current nominee. But past tensions between Obama’s camp and Biden’s camp have endured, forming some hairline fractures in the Democratic foundation. Some Biden aides boast that they wrapped up the nomination faster than Obama did in 2008. They tout that Biden’s abilities at retail, one-on-one politics are superior to those of the aloof former president. And they don’t easily forget the mocking or belittling of their campaign during the primary and revel in having proven the Obama brainiacs wrong.

Some have gotten caught in this crossfire—including Ron Klain, Biden’s former chief of staff, who has been working to regain Biden’s trust after having ditched the VP for Hillary Clinton’s campaign back when Biden still hoped to contend for the 2016 nomination.

Interviews with dozens of senior officials of the Obama-Biden administration painted a picture of eight years during which the president and vice president enjoyed a genuinely close personal relationship, built particularly around devotion to family, while at the same time many senior aides, sometimes tacitly encouraged by the president’s behavior, dismissed Biden as eccentric and a practitioner of an old, outmoded style of politics.

“You could certainly see technocratic eye-rolling at times,” said Jen Psaki, the former White House communications director. Young White House aides frequently mocked Biden’s gaffes and lack of discipline in comparison to the almost clerical Obama. They would chortle at how Biden, like an elderly uncle at Thanksgiving, would launch into extended monologues that everyone had heard before.

Former administration officials treated Biden dismissively in their memoirs.

Ben Rhodes, Obama’s former deputy national security adviser, who was known for his mind-meld with the president, wrote in his memoir that “in the Situation Room, Biden could be something of an unguided missile.”

Former FBI Director James Comey recalled in his book that “Obama would have a series of exchanges heading a conversation very clearly and crisply in Direction A. Then, at some point, Biden would jump in with, ‘Can I ask something, Mr. President?’”

Comey continued: “Obama would politely agree, but something in his expression suggested he knew full well that for the next five or 10 minutes we would all be heading in Direction Z. After listening and patiently waiting, President Obama would then bring the conversation back on course.”

Meanwhile, Biden loyalists stewed, aware that the vice president, who had gotten himself elected to the Senate at age 29 in the year of President Richard M. Nixon’s landslide reelection and served 36 years, had a range of Washington political skills Obama lacked. The president and his closest allies seemed unaware of how he would alienate potential allies with his preachy tone, particularly in Congress, where Biden excelled.

Biden, for his part, felt Obama too often let his head get in the way. “Sometimes I thought he was deliberate to a fault,” he wrote in his 2017 book Promise Me, Dad.

But, as is sometimes the case in a troubled marriage, there were three people in the Obama-Biden relationship.

And the person who ultimately came between Obama and Biden was Hillary Clinton.

Back in 2008, when Obama was struggling to close the deal on the Democratic nomination, he engaged in a legendary duel with then-Sen. Clinton, sparring with her for months in one-on-one debates in which the two matched wits like law professors in a mock courtroom.

Despite the exhaustive battle, Obama admired how she made him earn it (“backwards and in heels,” he said at her convention in 2016). Clinton and her husband’s enthusiastic campaigning for Obama that fall helped seal the respect between the former rivals: Obama wanted Clinton to be secretary of State and handle world affairs while he tackled the tumbling economy. Biden’s own 2008 presidential campaign, meanwhile, had barely made a mark and fizzled after he won less than 1 percent in Iowa.

From the start, Obama’s personal style meshed better with Clinton’s—in the sense that they were both very disciplined and cerebral—than with Biden’s much more free-wheeling approach. Even if Obama sensed that Biden provided a much-needed complement and contrast, he naturally gravitated toward Clinton.

Obama and Clinton both viewed themselves as pioneers who worked their way through America’s elite colleges. Obama went to Columbia University and Harvard Law School, where he headed the law review; Clinton went from Wellesley to Yale Law School. They shared a work style as well, always sure to do their homework and arrive at a meeting prepared to get to the crux of an issue. “They do the reading,” said one former Clinton aide. “In Situation Room meetings, she had the thickest binder and had read it three times.”

Biden’s own academic career was unimpressive—he repeated the third grade, earned all Cs and Ds in his first three semesters at the University of Delaware except for As in P.E., a B in “Great English Writers” and an F in ROTC, and graduated 76th in his Syracuse Law School class of 85 students. He’s the first Democratic nominee since Walter Mondale in 1984 not to have an Ivy League degree. He was not a binder person, Clinton and Obama aides said.

Biden admitted as much in his 2007 memoir Promises to Keep, writing “It’s important to read reports and listen to the experts; more important is being able to read people in power.”

Biden’s tendency to blurt out whatever was on his mind rankled Obama, who wasn’t afraid to needle him for it. In his first press conference in 2009, the young president quipped “I don’t remember exactly what Joe was referring to—not surprisingly,” when asked about Biden’s assessment that there was a 30 percent chance they could get the economic stimulus package wrong.

The gaffes were only one side of the story, though. Obama warmed both to Biden’s effusive personality and his skill in implementing the administration’s $787 billion economic stimulus package, which the president had delegated to him.

Aides recall that Obama and Biden took almost polar-opposite approaches to policymaking, Obama always seeking data for the most logical or efficient outcome, while Biden told stories about how a bill would affect the working-class guy in Scranton, Pennsylvania, where he was born. When a deal was finally made, Obama would bemoan the compromises, while Biden would celebrate the points of agreement.

“Biden doesn’t come from the wonky angle of leadership,” said a senior Obama administration official. “It’s different than the last two Democratic presidents. Biden is from a different style. It’s an older style, of Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson of ‘Let’s meet, let’s negotiate, let’s talk, let’s have a deal.’”

Republicans who negotiated with the administration often came away finding Obama condescending and relying on Biden to understand their concerns.

“Negotiating with President Obama was all about the fact that he felt that he knew the world better than you,” said Eric Cantor, the Republican House majority leader from 2011 to 2014. “And he felt that he thought about it so much, that he figured it all out, and no matter what conclusion you had come to with the same set of facts, his way was right.” Biden, he said, understood that “you’re gonna have to agree to disagree about some things.”

A former Republican leadership aide described Obama’s style as “mansplaining, basically.” The person added that Biden “may not be sitting down talking about Thucydides but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t have a high level of political intelligence.”

Valerie Jarrett, Obama’s close adviser and family friend, bristled at any suggestion that Obama’s negotiating style was responsible for tensions with members of Congress: “Obama was younger than many of them. He was the first Black president. He wasn’t a part of that club,” Jarrett said.

But Obama would often convey a weariness with the traditional obligations of political leadership: the glad-handing, the massaging of egos. Sometimes he couldn’t hide his disdain for part of the job he signed up for.

At the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in 2013, in front of a roomful of journalists, Obama joked, “Some folks still don’t think I spend enough time with Congress. ‘Why don’t you get a drink with Mitch McConnell?’ they ask. Really? ‘Why don’t you get a drink with Mitch McConnell?’ I’m sorry, I get frustrated sometimes.”

Biden, former aides say, didn’t get why that was funny. Biden wrote in his 2007 memoir that likely “the single most important piece of advice I got in my career” came from the late Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield (D-Mont.) who told him, “Your job here is to find the good things in your colleagues—the things their state saw—and not focus on the bad.”

Mansfield added: “And, Joe, never attack another man’s motive, because you don’t know his motive.”

Thus, Biden invested time in developing those relationships that Obama never did.

Denis McDonough, Obama’s former chief of staff, said Biden “always wanted to have had two conversations with someone before he would ask that person for something. … Once in a while you’re like, ‘Hey, can we get through those two touches so you can make the ask here,’ but he just wouldn’t do it. That’s the kind of operation he runs.”

Advance staffers recall that Obama’s speeches were arranged to be delivered alone on the stage with voters behind him, while Biden would push to include every local elected official up there with him, knowing they would love the exposure to the vice president—a chit to cash in later.

Psaki, for one, recalled that the president often saw photo lines as obligations while they might be the best part of the vice president’s day.

“His background is much more retail politics kind of person, and the president was very much sort of a wholesale kind of president,” said former Sen. Ted Kaufman, a longtime Biden adviser who is now heading up his presidential transition effort.

Immediately after Obama’s reelection in 2012, Biden’s team started thinking about his own 2016 run. His mind wasn’t entirely made up, but he wanted to focus on a few areas—particularly infrastructure—that could form the basis of a forward-looking campaign agenda, according to former Biden officials and Democrats they consulted.

One former Biden aide described the vice president’s thinking as “I want to find the ways to stay viable to make the decision on my own terms.”

From early on, however, it became increasingly clear that Obama and many of his closest aides were helping along a Hillary Clinton succession.

In the past few years, the story of how that happened has taken on a particular shape. After Clinton’s 2016 loss and a certain amount of Monday-morning quarterbacking about her weakness as a candidate, many Obama aides tried to cast the president’s snub of Biden as purely an act of compassion: Biden was grieving for his son Beau, who died of cancer in 2015, and didn’t have the emotional bandwidth to handle a campaign.

Biden himself has offered this explanation in public, and Jarrett, the ultimate Obama loyalist, insists that was largely the case: “Vice President Biden was devastated, as any parent would be, by the loss of Beau. It was excruciating to watch him suffer the way he did,” she said.

But numerous administration veterans, including loyalists to both Obama and Biden, remember it differently: Obama had begun embracing Clinton as a possible successor years before Biden lost his son, while the vice president was laying the groundwork for his own campaign.

Just after Obama’s second inauguration in 2013, Democrats turned on their TVs to see Obama singing Clinton’s praises in a joint “60 Minutes” interview on the occasion of Clinton’s departure from the State Department—one that two Clinton aides say was suggested by Obama’s team, albeit as a print interview.

“Why have them sit together for two hours and have 200 of their words used?,” recalled Philippe Reines, Clinton’s press aide at the time. “I always just prefer TV. And I’m like, ‘Let’s go for gold. Let’s do ‘60 Minutes.’ And Ben [Rhodes] said, ‘I love it.’”

“I was a big admirer of Hillary’s before our primary battles and the general election,” Obama enthused. “You know, her discipline, her stamina, her thoughtfulness, her ability to project, I think, and make clear issues that are important to the American people, I thought made her an extraordinary talent. … [P]art of our bond is we’ve been through a lot of the same stuff.”

To which Clinton gushed, “I think there’s a sense of understanding that, you know, sometimes doesn’t even take words because we have similar views.”

When interviewer Steve Kroft raised the prospect of a Clinton presidential run, both Obama and Clinton played it coy, saying it was way too early for such thinking, but doing nothing to discourage the idea.

Then Obama’s political sage, David Plouffe [above]—the man who had dedicated a year and a half to taking down Clinton in 2008—offered his help in mid-2013 and met with Clinton, according to a Democrat familiar with the overture. (Plouffe maintains that Clinton’s team approached him first.) Obama’s pollster, Joel Benenson, later hopped on board. In early 2015, so did top Obama aides John Podesta and Jennifer Palmieri. Clinton’s campaign even began interviewing and picking off people from Biden’s office, including Alex Hornbrook, who became Clinton’s director of scheduling and advance.

“It certainly felt like Obama’s world was behind us,” said one former Clinton campaign aide. “It wasn’t just Plouffe, Palmieri and Benenson. From the beginning, a lot of key Obama aides came over and helped stand up our campaign.” It was so blatant that some Clinton aides wondered whether Obama had just wrongly assumed that Biden wasn’t interested in running because of his age.

On January 5, 2015, Biden and Obama privately discussed a White House run at their weekly lunch. Obama “had been subtly weighing in against,” Biden recalled in Promise Me, Dad, his 2017 book.

“I also believe he had concluded that Hillary Clinton was almost certain to be the nominee, which was good by him,” Biden wrote. A campaign spokesperson added that in the meeting, Obama also said, “If I could appoint anyone to be president over the next eight years, Joe, it would be you.”

Panetta, who had known Clinton from his days as her husband’s White House chief of staff, recalled that “Both she and her staff worked at that a great deal in trying to build that support.” Among Obama and his aides, Panetta said, “I think there was a certain attraction to someone that would certainly break ceilings and kind of create the same kind of precedent that he created when he became president … as opposed to supporting somebody who’s kind of your more traditional politician and, you know, a white Irish Catholic guy.”

There was also dismissiveness of Biden in Clinton’s orbit that echoed Obama aides. “The good thing about a Biden run,” Neera Tanden, Clinton’s close aide who also advised the Obama administration on health policy, wrote to Podesta in 2015, in an email later exposed by WikiLeaks, “is that he would make Hillary look so much better.”

Obama tried to remain above the fray, even as his closest staffers largely rallied around Clinton—which they likely would not have done if there was a chance he would support Biden. “I knew a number of the president’s former staffers, and even a few current ones, were putting a finger on the scale for Clinton,” Biden wrote.

Pressed on whether Obama ever expressed a preference between Clinton and Biden, Jarrett demurred, saying, “that’s a conversation you’ll have to have with him.”

Obama declined to be interviewed through his spokesperson. “President Obama has been unequivocal in his respect for Joe’s wisdom, experience, empathy and integrity,” the spokesperson said in a statement.

Even if he did express preference for Clinton, some Obama officials characterized it more as an acknowledgment of her strength than an attempt to undercut Biden.

“There was a feeling of inevitability about Hillary Clinton in every aspect,” recalled Psaki. “So it never felt to me like it was Obama choosing Hillary Clinton over Joe Biden. It was a feeling like it’s inevitable after Hillary Clinton left the State Department that she will be the Democratic nominee, and she will become the next president. So Obama … was trying to play a part in being helpful.”

Reines said Obama “was always very encouraging” of Clinton and that after serving as president, “he believed there was no one better prepared to do it.”

It was in the midst of the handoff to Clinton that Beau Biden’s health began deteriorating. Joe Biden had had an especially deep bond with his eldest son since Beau’s mother and sister died in a car accident that seriously injured Beau and his brother Hunter. Before the 46-year-old Beau passed away that May from an aggressive form of brain cancer, he had been a firm advocate for his Dad to run and, even in intense grief, Biden made serious preparations in the summer and fall of 2015 to jump into the race.

The Clinton camp took Biden’s deliberations seriously. Podesta told people he believed Biden would go for it. The Clinton team assembled an oppo-research book on him with the code name “Project Acela,” according to one former Clinton official. Negative stories began popping up. The Clinton campaign denied having had any role, but Biden was skeptical.

Obama pressed the issue in another private meeting. “The president was not encouraging,” Biden recalled.

A more direct kind of brushback occurred that fall. Plouffe—the Obama strategist who had been quietly advising Clinton since 2013—met with Biden and told him not to end his career in embarrassment with a third place finish in Iowa, according to multiple accounts of the meeting.

“There just wasn’t an opening,” Plouffe said, explaining why he advised Biden against the run. “He started asking the question in the 4th quarter of the contest.” Plouffe argued that Biden hadn’t done the necessary legwork before 2015 that previous vice presidents had done before their runs.

Clinton’s campaign conducted a survey around the same time showing Biden in third in Iowa. In a foreshadowing of Biden’s 2020 performance, the analysis also showed his tremendous strength among African American voters.

“With Biden in the race, our support among African Americans drops by 23 points,” an internal Clinton memo noted ominously. “While we still lead, it is not the overwhelming, commanding lead we hold in a one-on-one race with [Bernie] Sanders.”

The most stinging rebuke, however, came when Klain—Biden’s former chief of staff who went back decades with him to when he was chief counsel on Biden’s Judiciary Committee in 1989—defected to Clinton.

Ebola Response Coordinator Ron Klain, Vice President Joe Biden and White House Senior Adviser Valerie Jarrett at a November 2014 meeting in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building.

“It’s been a little hard for me to play such a role in the Biden demise,” Klain wrote to Podesta in October 2015, a week before Biden gave in and announced he would not run. “I am definitely dead to them—but I’m glad to be on Team HRC.”

According to the email, which was released by WikiLeaks in what American intelligence officials have concluded was a Russian-backed effort to hurt the Clinton campaign, Klain added: “Thanks for inviting me into the campaign, and for sticking with me during the Biden anxiety.”

In the years since Clinton’s loss, Democrat operatives have chuckled at Klain’s attempts to earn his way back into Biden’s good graces, including lots of Twitter praise for the former vice president. Klain is not on the campaign’s payroll but remains an adviser, and observers assume he’s hoping to be chief of staff in a Biden White House. Klain refused to elaborate on the situation: “I’m not going to comment on a story that uses Russian intelligence measures.”

In a sign of the raw feelings, Biden’s aides declined to comment on the fallout from Klain’s defection but said they are happy he is on board in 2020.

Lingering tensions between the Biden and Obama camps were subtly visible in the 2020 primary campaign, in which Obama declined to endorse any candidate.

Many top Obama administration and campaign officials sat on the sidelines or worked for candidates other than Biden. Top former aides including strategist David Axelrod and the young hosts of Pod Save America—Jon Favreau, Tommy Vietor, Jon Lovett and Dan Pfeiffer—at times ridiculed the former vice president’s campaign. Biden is one of the few candidates to have not gone on either of their popular podcasts during the campaign, despite having been invited: “I can’t speak for his campaign’s scheduling decisions,” said Vietor, “but the Zoom is always open.”

Biden aides acknowledge that Obama didn’t do nearly as much for Biden in 2020 as he did for Clinton in 2016.

The lack of public enthusiasm for Biden was noticeable enough that former Obama senior adviser Pete Rouse—who was one of the aides who helped Biden organize his potential 2016 run—addressed it at a fundraiser of Obama alumni for Biden last November that he helped organize.

“I think the turnout tonight demonstrates the high regard in which the vice president is held in the extended Obama family,” Rouse told the crowd of about 50 people. “And I think that that message is not out as far as it should be.”

Yet searing, anonymously sourced quotes from Obama kept appearing through the race. One Democrat who spoke to Obama recalled the former president warning, “Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to fuck things up.” Speaking of his own waning understanding of today’s Democratic electorate, especially in Iowa, Obama told one 2020 candidate: “And you know who really doesn’t have it? Joe Biden.”

Biden’s weaknesses were such that even Clinton reconsidered her decision not to get into the race last fall, according to Reines.

“There were a number of people who decided not to run and then around, October, before Thanksgiving said to themselves, ‘You know, did I make the right decision?,’ he said, name-checking Mike Bloomberg and Deval Patrick who did make late entries. “She went through that exercise.”

But Biden proved them all wrong.

His focus on electability along with a sentimental message about saving the soul of the nation—“character is on the ballot”—was dismissed by many pundits and reporters as hokey and uninspiring, but ended up being the winning one.

One former Clinton aide noted that Biden’s ability to cultivate personal relationships paid dividends at the primary’s end: Bernie Sanders saw Biden as one of the few people in Washington who took him seriously before his 2016 run for president. After it was clear Biden had an insurmountable delegate lead, Sanders decided not to drag out the fight the way he did against Clinton in 2016.

“That relationship is why Bernie got out in March,” said the former Clinton aide.

“I don’t know who saw him sailing to the nomination,” said Psaki. Biden’s old-fashioned style of politics, she reasoned, “still taps into something in the American electorate. And maybe we’re not seeing that because I live in a suburb of Washington, D.C., with a bunch of upper middle-class white people.”

Or, as one former Biden official put it: “I don’t think he really cares about what a 30-something Pod Save America host thinks about him, and that honestly might be why he’s the nominee.”

But even in victory, Biden and his aides often act like they have something to prove to the Obama team that doubted them. Some Biden allies noted that Obama’s endorsement of Biden, when it finally arrived, lacked the effusiveness of his endorsement of Clinton. “I don’t think there’s ever been someone so qualified to hold this office,” he said of Clinton in his video message in 2016. Four years later, in his endorsement video for Biden, he said: “I believe Joe has all of the qualities we need in a president right now … and I know he will surround himself with good people.”

Biden aides also fumed at Axelrod and Plouffe penning a New York Times op-ed that instructed them on “What Joe Biden Needs to Do to Beat Trump,” according to Democrats who talked with them.

Meanwhile, some senior Democrats credited Obama for Biden’s comeback given his strength among Black voters, while Biden has emphasized he did it on his own.

After the South Carolina primary win, he told aides that Obama hadn’t “lifted a finger” to help him. Anita Dunn, an Obama administration aide and top adviser to Biden’s presidential campaign, said “[Biden] did feel that he needed to go out and earn it himself, as opposed to having people see it as an extension of a third Obama term or having it be any kind of referendum directly on Obama.”

Now, as Reines put it, Biden “might have the last laugh of everybody.”Biden has long been defensive about suggestions of being dumb or a lightweight—a narrative that took hold during in his first campaign for the presidency, in 1988. As a kid, a teacher mocked him for his stutter (“Bu-bu-bu-bu-Biden,” she went, according to his 2007 memoir). “Other kids looked at me like I was stupid,” Biden wrote.

Or, as Richard Ben Cramer wrote in his classic about the 1988 race: “Joe Biden had balls. Lot of times, more balls than sense.” Biden didn’t seem to mind that assessment, as he brought on Cramer’s researcher, Mark Zwonitzer, to help write his books in 2007 and 2017.

“I had to convince the Big Feet [his euphemism for national reporters] that I had depth,” he recalled about that 1988 race. Striving to answer his critics, he puffed up his academic credentials on the trail (“I exaggerate when I’m angry,” he later tried to explain). In a heated exchange in New Hampshire during the 1988 campaign, he uncharacteristically snapped at a voter who asked him which law school he attended and his class rank that “I have a much higher IQ than you do, I suspect.”

Sen. Joe Biden, pictured with his wife Jill, holds a news conference in Washington on Sept. 23, 1987, to announce he is withdrawing from the Democratic race for the presidential nomination.

In the less-remembered part of that encounter, however, Biden also decried the snobby intelligentsia that had taken over the Democratic Party. “It seems to me you’ve all become heartless technocrats,” he said. “We have never as a party moved this nation by 14-point position papers and nine-point programs.”

That sensibility is part of what separates him from Obama. “It really is the difference between street smarts and, you know, Harvard smart,” Panetta said.

That’s why even some Republicans believe Biden may be better poised to fulfill Obama’s promises of restoring unity and civility in Washington than the “change we can believe in” 44th president was. If Biden wins, many Democrats and Republicans believe that at least relations between the White House and Congress will be better than in any other recent administration, including Obama’s.

“Obama, clearly he was smart, he was bright, he would come up with proposals, but that second part of then taking those proposals and working and lobbying members and listening to them and doing all of the things that need to be done when you’re dealing with the egos on Capitol Hill was not something that came easily to him,” Panetta said. “He was impatient with that process. I think Biden understands that process and understands what it takes.”

Even with Biden as the Democratic nominee, Republican leadership and their aides can’t help but feel more animosity toward Obama than Biden. In negotiations, Biden asked them what they could sell to their caucus while Obama would trenchantly but unproductively lecture leadership about why their caucus’ worldview was wrong, the aides said.

“Frankly, I came to dread those Oval Office meetings because they were lost time,” said one such former aide. “Those were hours of your life you were never getting back.”

Vice President Joe Biden is emotional as President Barack Obama presents him with the Presidential Medal of Freedom during a ceremony at the White House, Jan. 12, 2017.

Axelrod echoed this view in his memoir. “Few practiced politicians appreciate being lectured on where their political self-interest lies,” he wrote of Obama’s style. “That hint of moral superiority and disdain for politicians who put elections first has hurt Obama as negotiator, and it’s why Biden, a politician’s politician, has often had better luck.”

The other advantage Biden brings, according to his advisers, is his nearly unrivaled Rolodex.

“Obama knew some of these people, but it wasn’t like a deep relationship,” said Kaufman. “He knows mayors and governors, he knows the members of Congress much better than Obama did.”

Biden once wrote, “A person’s epitaph was written when his or her last battle was fought.”

Is this battle in part a way to show that Obama favored the wrong successor?

“I think Joe’s the type that victory makes all the difference,” said Panetta. “And if he can win the presidency, I think that will say an awful lot to a lot of people about who Joe Biden really is.”

 

 

 

Don’t Run, Elizabeth!

MICHAEL TOMASKY, DAILY BEAST


So, Hillary’s taken a few questions from the press now. But something more interesting than that has been happening over the past month: She has moved to the left or signaled her intention to do so on a pretty broad range of issues. All of you who want Elizabeth Warren in the race? Chill, people. She practically is.

Now, for all I know it might make the Clinton people cringe to see me write that, because it surely provides some degree of ammo for the right. But I reckon the right would have noticed this without my intervention, so my conscience is clear. But this is the emerging reality: If you are a 40-something Democrat who has voted over the years for Bill Clinton and Al Gore and John Kerry and Barack Obama, it’s looking like you are about to cast a vote next year for the most liberal Democratic nominee of your voting lifetime.

Start with the two positions she’s taken since the announcement video that have probably gotten the most attention. Her immigration position is considerably more aggressive than Obama’s, expanding his executive actions to allow more people to obtain work permits. Then, on prisons, she famously called for the end of the era of mass incarceration. The speech was filled with pleas to get low-level and nonviolent offenders out of prison and with sentences like “there is something wrong when a third of all black men face the prospect of prison during their lifetimes.”

There’s a lot more where that came from, usually announced, or mentioned, in those meetings with voters that the press following her so loathe. Here are the four most notable ones. These aren’t fully fleshed-out policy proposals, but presumably those will come:

• She told an audience in Keene, New Hampshire, that the country needs a free and universal pre-kindergarten program.



• At Tina Brown’s Women in the World summit in New York, she called for greatly expanded after-school and child-care programs. Also in Keene, she came out for closing the carried-interest loophole for hedge-fund managers, and the rhetoric was pretty populist, as she told furniture workers: “You are in the production of goods, and I want to do everything I can to support goods and real services and take a hard look at what is now being done in the trading world, which is just trading for the sake of trading. And it’s just wrong that a hedge fund manager pays a lower tax rate than a nurse or a trucker or an assembly worker here at Whitney Brothers.”

• And most important from my personal point of view, she’s been speaking out strongly in favor of paid family and medical leave, saying to a questioner at a Norwalk, Iowa, roundtable: “Well, boy, you are right on my wavelength because, look, we are the last developed country in the world that has no national paid leave for parenting, for illness.  And what we know from the few states that have done it—California being most notable here—is it builds loyalty.  If you really analyzed turnover in a lot of businesses where you have to retrain somebody—well, first you have to find them and then you have to retrain them—making your employees feel that you care about these milestones in their lives and you give them the chance to have a child, adopt a child, recover from a serious illness, take care of a really sick parent and get a period of time that’s paid just cements that relationship.”

These six positions—along with her support for a much higher minimum wage that’s indexed to inflation—almost by themselves make Clinton the most on-paper progressive candidate (and putative nominee) since who knows when. She is saying things that one never thought the Hillary Clinton of 10 or 20 years ago would have said.

It may be true that it’s less that she’s changed than that the times have, and she’s adapting. But hey, give her credit for adapting. Last summer, during her book tour, she said she didn’t think paid family leave was possible. Now, she’s talking like someone who isn’t merely describing a crappy reality but someone who sees that the point is to change it.

Chris Rock and Tom Lennon in What to Expect When You're Expecting Melissa Moseley/Associated Press

There are some important positions she hasn’t taken yet. On the TPP trade agreement, most obviously, which is one on which I think she might go against the left, although I’m just guessing. I want to see what she has to say down the road about entitlements. Something tells me, the way she’s been talking so far, that there won’t be much emphasis on grand bargains and being responsible and raising the retirement age. I’ll be curious to see, for example, whether she endorses raising the payroll tax cap. I went to see West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin speak at Brookings the other day, and he said he’d gladly support raising the cap to help fix the entitlements’ insolvency problems. If Joe can say it, can Hillary?

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a column urging liberals to suck it up and accept the fact that Hillary Clinton was the choice and there’s too much at stake and there’s nothing else to do so just get over it and support her. That column didn’t say much about her positions. It was just about the Supreme Court and what a nightmare Republican rule would be.

But at the rate she’s going, very little sucking it up will be required. She’s turning into a bona fide progressive. She may not go for the class-warfare rhetorical jugular with quite Warren’s gusto. But “the top 25 hedge-fund managers together make more money than all the kindergarten teachers in America,” which she said this week in Iowa, is close enough for me, and a lot closer than I thought she was going to be at this stage.

NY REVIEW OF BOOKS, GARRY WILLS

Believers in the good and true have for some time been urging Elizabeth Warren to run for president. They don’t, most of them, expect her to win—just to hold Hillary Clinton’s feet to the fire on populist issues she is beginning to endorse. Warren might even pry loose some of Wall Street’s cephalopod arms wrapped around Hillary. But Warren is already doing that, by her stellar work on the concrete issues that have long animated her—jobs, wages, bank excesses, mortgages, student loans. All the things she is doing in these areas pose a challenge to Hillary, which is why Hillary has been adopting some of her positions.

Besides, Bernie Sanders, having convinced himself that Warren is not going to run, has taken up the task of fire-bringing to Hillary’s feet. Good for him. His work at his day job in the Senate will be less missed than Warren’s. She is a massive presence there, perpetually bearing in on her colleagues—and the president. Sanders is more a gadfly making some of the livestock itchy. Furthermore, as a declared socialist he is so unlikely a candidate that there is little chance of his being infected by the attendant delirium of a campaign and starting to believe he can win. Of course he has to lie, as all candidates do, when he says he is “in it to win it.” Bill Buckley demonstrated long ago how dangerous is the truth for anyone running a symbolic campaign.



In 1965, when he was running for mayor of New York, Buckley was asked what he would do if he won, and he shot back: “Demand a recount.” That one comment got more attention than all the position papers he had labored over to show that the nascent Conservative Party of New York should be taken seriously. More immediately, the quip almost made his assistant campaign manager faint. He took Buckley aside and said, “You have people working night and day for your campaign. You can’t dismiss their efforts, making it harder for them to raise money or make voters pay attention.” Buckley never again said he could not win. He had learned the rules: pretend candidates have to pretend they are not pretending. It seems almost cruel to let down people whose belief in you is greater than your own.

Of course, once you start professing belief in yourself, it is easy to try sipping some of your own Kool-Aid. It saves psychic wear and tear just to go along with the campaign’s official line. I observed the perils of pretend campaigns in the case of Ralph Nader. In 1972, many were urging Nader to run for president—among them my friend Marc Raskin. Nader told Raskin he had worked hard to master the projects he was devoted to—car safety, consumer protection, the environment, and the PIRGs (Public Interest Research Groups) he was setting up state-by-state. If he ran for president, he would have to learn about many things he had not studied (who is the president of Uzbekistan?) and try pleasing a range of constituents with priorities very far from his own. He could do more by staying focused.



But ten years later, I ran into Nader at the New Hampshire primary and had lunch with him. When I quoted what he had told Raskin, he said that he now had wider interests and had convinced himself that the best way to draw attention to his concerns was to become a candidate for the highest office in the land. He ran half-heartedly in 1972, but in the nineties he changed his mind, readying himself to plunge ruinously into the 2000 race, where he came as a savior to prove that there was no real difference between Democrats and Republicans and we should reject them both for his one true position. This made him refuse to run only in states where he could not affect the outcome (advice given him by friends like his old fan Marc Raskin). He thus became one of the factors electing George Bush, giving us all the Iraq war, torture, and the Surveillance State. He has haunted subsequent presidential campaigns as the ghost of his former self, a social prophet dwindled into a mini-messiah, joining Gene McCarthy in the Harold Stassen brigade of perpetual candidates. That is how running for president can hollow you out.

I would never compare Elizabeth Warren to Nader. She is more profound and more human than Nader, the furious ascetic; and people prefer a genially learned preacher to a desert father. She is probably proof against the delusions that campaigns instill in their captives. But I would hate to see her wasting her valuable time on what I think of as visionitis, the concocting of airy nothingnesses to show you have a big message, a dream, that you want to share with Americans. In the 2012 campaign journalists called on candidates to “go big, not small,” which meant getting higher and emptier. In the 1968 presidential race, the first I covered as a journalist, Richard Nixon was told that he needed to enunciate a vision, and someone on his still-small staff (I think it must have been Pat Buchanan) came up with one—that under him the country will have “the lift of a driving dream.” Nixon shakily kept rehearsing that line in the New Hampshire and Wisconsin primaries, pairing it with a feeble Harold Lloyd right-uppercut gesture. When George H.W. Bush was campaigning he made fun of “the vision thing,” but then he took the one written out for him, reading “Message: I care.” His son said the same thing—that is, nothing—with more syllables, when he promised a “compassionate conservatism.”

Warren has better things to do than fool with such ventures into lyrical nonsense. She has become a force by sticking with what she knows better than anyone—the obscenity of banks’ high profits and workers’ low wages. She understands the concerns of ordinary people with jobs, health care, and student loans. While Republican governors are trying to learn who is the president of Uzbekistan, she has better things to do.

May 12, 2015, 12:24 p.m.

Hillary Clinton Is More Vulnerable in 2016 Than You Think

Hillary Rodham Clinton at an event for Emily's List in Washington on Tuesday. Credit Jabin Botsford/The New York Times       

N.Y. TIMES, NATE COHEN

Hillary Clinton is a primary candidate whose strength has little precedent, one who seems poised to sweep the primaries without facing any serious challenge.

The general election is a different story. Mrs. Clinton would not cruise to victory, and, yes, she could easily lose.

 

In the aftermath of President Obama’s re-election, it was common to suggest that Mrs. Clinton was an unusually formidable general election candidate, and the polls seemed to back it up. Her favorability ratings soared to the mid-60s during her tenure as secretary of state. In hypothetical head-to-head polling matchups, she even led in places such as Texas against home-state candidates like Rick Perry. Feeding the perception of her strength was the notion that Democrats had an advantage in presidential elections, given their sway among growing parts of the electorate, like young and nonwhite voters, and their apparent Electoral College advantage.

 

But Mrs. Clinton will not be a Democratic Eisenhower, a popular, senior statesperson who cruises to an easy victory. Her popularity has already faded considerably over the last two years. Her support could erode even further as the campaign unfolds, or as she comes under new scrutiny, be it for foreign donations to the Clinton Foundation, her private email account as secretary of state or new issues.

 

 

As many analysts predicted, her high ratings were unsustainable — her popularity the product of serving as the country’s top diplomat, partly shielded from domestic political criticism. Her ratings have returned to earth since her exit from the position in early 2013 — and since she has emerged as the likely Democratic nominee in the 2016 presidential election.

The polls now show her favorability rating beneath 50 percent, making her a fairly typical candidate for the presidency. Her numbers are much more similar to Mr. Obama’s and Mitt Romney’s ratings in late 2012 than her own ratings from two years ago. She has, in other words, gone back to being what Mr. Obama’s supporters alleged in 2008: a polarizing figure, just as Mr. Obama is today.

 

What’s notable about the recent decline in her approval rating is that it has returned to Mrs. Clinton’s apparently natural level of public support.

Her ratings started out high as first lady in 1993, as is often the case with that role, but dropped to the mid-40s when she pursued health reform. Her ratings surged during the Monica Lewinsky scandal, but returned to the mid-40s once she ran for Senate, and remained there through her 2008 presidential campaign. Her ratings recovered again after she withdrew from the 2008 race and was no longer active in day-to-day politics.

 

There is little about Mrs. Clinton’s electoral history that suggests she’s a stronger candidate than these ratings. As a Senate candidate in New York in 2000, she ran well behind Al Gore’s presidential election numbers in New York that year. Few defend her performance in the 2008 presidential primaries. If anything, the extent to which she was criticized by the left has largely been forgotten. As Slate’s Alec MacGillis put it, there is “a sort of collective amnesia among Obama supporters when it comes to their former estimation of Clinton — a reluctance to reckon fully with their aversion to her then and what has come of it since.”

 

Photo by Andrew Kelly/Reuters

 

Although it’s true that Democrats have fared well in recent presidential elections, there is no guarantee their success will continue. In 2016, the Democratic nominee will have to argue for a third term for the party... At the moment, Mr. Obama’s approval ratings and the pace of economic growth are consistent with a close, competitive race...

 

There were signs in last year’s midterm elections that dissatisfaction with Mr. Obama’s performance was costing Democrats among white voters without a college degree, most obviously in the countryside of Iowa and Colorado. Those 2014 results suggest that Republicans have a route to winning the White House, even if it’s a narrower one than the Democrats’ path.

Yes, Mrs. Clinton has a large lead over her likeliest Republican challengers in national polls, including in many of the most important battleground states. But general-election polls more than a year before Election Day have little meaning...

 

 There is also evidence, especially in state polling, that Mrs. Clinton’s support from traditionally Democratic, white, conservative voters is unsustainable — especially in the South and Appalachia.

 

None of this is not to say that Mrs. Clinton is a weak candidate. Mr. Obama won re-election, after all, despite evolving into a polarizing figure. Her favorability rating is better than that of any of her Republican opponents, who are all poised to become just as polarizing as she. There is a case that she will be a better candidate than she was in 2008, when she was widely caricatured as calculating and unlikable. Many believed that she was already a much stronger candidate by the time the 2008 campaign was over.

 

(Matt Rourke/AP Photo)

 

If Mrs. Clinton does prove to be a particularly adept candidate, given how close the race shapes up to be, it could make a significant difference. But at least for now, her favorability ratings don’t resemble those of an especially strong candidate. The better argument for her strength would be the demographic advantages of today’s Democratic coalition.

If the Democrats have such an advantage, then Mrs. Clinton, a person who has engendered great loyalty from many Democratic-leaning voters, may be the candidate best positioned to reassemble that coalition...

   

OBAMA AND THE COMING ELECTION

ELIZABETH DREW, N.Y. REVIEW OF BOOKS

—August 27, 2014

The most important question in this year’s midterm elections is whether the Republicans will gain control of the Senate while retaining their majority in the House. That could make Congress still more belligerent toward the president. It would not only continue to block progress on pressing national needs but also prevent him from shoring up the progressive faction on the Supreme Court against what a possible Republican successor would do.

Also uncertain is to what extent the Democrats can reverse the enormous gains the Republicans made in 2010, when they took over both the governorships and the legislatures of twelve formerly Democratic states. They now control twenty-six states, which has had major substantive effects on national policy. For example, twenty Republican-dominated states have refused to expand Medicaid coverage to their poorest citizens or to set up their own health insurance exchanges under the Affordable Care Act.

As of now, the turnout this November is predicted to be uncommonly low, even for midterms, which traditionally attract fewer voters than do presidential elections. Midterm voters are older, whiter, and, since they include fewer and fewer veterans of the New Deal era, over time they have come to represent more conservative values than the voters in presidential contests.

Republicans have been remarkably successful in blocking bills supported by Obama, and this in turn has helped convince voters that his accomplishments are meager. Frustration with the gridlock in Washington and feelings of discouragement about the future have led to a particularly sour electorate, which also takes a dim view of the Republican Congress. (In recent polling, no more than 19 percent approved of it.) The sour mood could well affect the turnout; and a small number of voters could determine how the country is governed for the next two years.

With the president’s job approval dropping below 50%, Republicans are trying to identify his party’s candidates with him. And since for the first time his rating for likability is below 50 percent, the president now has less to fall back on. It’s often difficult for politicians of the president’s party to deflect the attacks on him. It’s even more unlikely to happen if they don’t try.

As expected, the Republicans are attacking incumbents who supported Obamacare—or they are demanding that would-be Democratic senators say whether they would support it, but the fact is that congressional Republicans have given up even pretending that they would repeal it. Though Obamacare is by now generally working, it remains deeply unpopular. Yet voters don’t list it as among their top concerns. It turns out that it’s the president’s name in the nickname for the law—Obamacare, a Republican invention that the president had no choice but to embrace—that’s highly unpopular, and even Republicans aren’t challenging the health care law’s most popular reforms. So Democratic candidates are loath to extoll Obamacare as such, and many of them are offering up the less than rousing line that it needs to be fixed but not ended.

Probably not since Richard Nixon have so many candidates shied away from being in the presence of their party’s president when he shows up in their states—though they welcome his strenuous fund-raising efforts on their behalf. It’s often said that the president should socialize more with Republicans, but they, too, don’t want to be seen in his presence and often turn down White House invitations; John Boehner has been forbidden by the House Republican caucus to negotiate with Obama on his own. Yet the public perception is that the failure of Washington to solve major problems during the past six years falls on the president as well as on those actually responsible—the Republicans. In fact, no president in history has faced such intransigence from the opposition party. It’s undeniable that the president’s race has a significant part in the destructive ways in which he is talked about and opposed.

Obama has on occasion fretted aloud that the focus in the news on the gridlock and dysfunction in Washington diverts attention from what he’s been able to achieve. When he’s long gone from the White House it could well become apparent that despite the odds Obama was responsible for notable achievements, among them Obamacare; getting gay marriage widely accepted; beginning to turn federal energy policy toward a more environmentally conscious set of policies; the Dodd-Frank bill’s restraints on Wall Street, however limited, with its rules still being argued over; and the establishment of the Consumer Financial Protection Agency championed by Elizabeth Warren.
Obama did much to pull the country out of the deep recession he inherited, including a rescue of the automobile industry, but a lot of people still don’t benefit from the improved economy, or have dropped out of the labor market, or have been forced into part-time jobs and lower wages.
No doubt it would have been beneficial if more money had been approved for rebuilding the nation’s crumbling infrastructure, but the votes in Congress weren’t there, just as they weren’t for a single-payer health system, and no amount of presidential rhetoric or arm-twisting—about which there is a fair amount of mythology—would have made a difference.

It’s been evident for quite a while that a certain chilliness on Obama’s part has affected his relations with Congress, but it’s also questionable how much substantive difference this has made. A Cabinet officer said to me, “He’s a loner, and one result is that few Democrats are willing to take the hill for him.” Obama rose swiftly in politics and essentially on his own—he’d been on his own for most of his life—and political camaraderie is of little interest to him. His golfing foursomes are most often made up of junior White House staff and close nonpolitical friends from Chicago. This might not make much difference in the number of bills passed but it has had one very serious effect on his presidency: the Democrats’ unwillingness to praise, defend, much less celebrate the president has left the field clear to his multitude of attackers.

Obama tended to proceed on the theory that if he made some concessions to the Republicans—say, by speeding up deportations of undocumented immigrants—they might be more cooperative; but this hasn’t worked out. It’s true that he is innately cautious, and it’s also true that it is a lot easier to declare what he should have done than to show how he could actually have gotten the votes for that. Little is as simple in the Oval Office as it is to outside critics.

 

Obama has been beset by the same problem on foreign policy. And as a result of his own actions (or inactions), Obama is accused of often overthinking an issue until too late, of being too slow to act, of allowing events to dictate his responses. It might seem that after eight years of George W. Bush’s rash and disastrous actions, caution would be welcome.

But the Ronald Reagan–John Wayne myth of bold, simple solutions lies deep in the American psyche. It was all so much simpler during the cold war; and the country became accustomed to simpler rhetoric. When Obama acts, or declines to, his critics—be they John McCain or an editorial writer or one of a myriad of foreign or defense policy “experts” who pop up on television—can urge from their comfortable perches that he should do more. But when McCain and his pal Lindsey Graham argue that the president should use greater force in Libya, Syria, Iraq, Ukraine, or wherever, they aren’t required to explain the downside risks, or what they would do next if their strategy failed.

When the president authorized air strikes against ISIS in Iraq in August, the usual Republicans inevitably said he wasn’t going far enough and some Democrats began to fret aloud that he might get too involved. Though some leading Democrats quickly drew a line at the use of American ground troops, the president is as reluctant as anyone else to use them. An official who has dealt with him on policy in the Middle East says, “Avoiding another Iraq is his guiding principle.”



The difficult situation Obama was in, politically as well as militarily, over ISIS made all the more jarring Hillary Clinton’s comment that if he had taken her advice and armed the “moderate” Syrian rebels, ISIS might not have developed. It also raised serious questions about both her political and strategic judgment.
An oddity about Mrs. Clinton’s complaint that the president allowed a vacuum in Syria in which ISIS could develop is that ISIS is an offshoot of al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) and it first emerged there as a result of Iraq’s dysfunction; so it’s questionable whether it could have been stamped out in Syria, much less by arming “moderate” forces. Bruce Riedel, a former high-level CIA official specializing in the Middle East and North Africa, a presidential adviser, and now with the Brookings Institution, told me, “ISIS’s base and stronghold is still in Iraq—the critics are in the wrong battlefield when they claim helping in Syria would have prevented ISIS.”
Mrs. Clinton’s efforts in the face of widespread criticism to smooth things over with the president weren’t likely to cause him to forget the whole thing. He can do a slow burn with the best of them. Moreover, the Clinton camp had been trying for weeks to call attention to her disagreement with the president over Syria, among other differences with him. Obama may recall that when he was first elected president and it became known that he was considering Clinton for the nomination for secretary of state—undoubtedly on the theory of “keep ’em in the corral”—Senator Edward Kennedy warned him that he was about to make a very serious mistake that he would come to regret: that the Clintons are about themselves.

Bruce Riedel [above] reaffirms the president’s view of the risks of arming “moderates” in Syria. Riedel said in a recent Brookings forum: “If you think you can give weapons only to the good guys, forget it. The bad guys will get them.” Later, he told me, “The president has had a very clear policy toward Syria: stay out of it at any cost. His governing policy is to avoid getting tangled up in situations in the Middle East and North Africa that can turn out to be disasters.” But ISIS may force his hand to get more and more involved in Syria with air strikes and special forces and perhaps drones, as he has already done in Iraq.

 

A problem for the public is that the president occasionally sends confusing signals—doing a little of what he’d adamantly said shouldn’t be done, or feinting in the direction of more involvement without wanting to follow through. The president more than once moved toward greater involvement in Syria while at the same time seeking to make sure that it wouldn’t happen. In 2012 he drew a “red line” on the Assad regime’s use of chemical weapons against its own citizens and then was much criticized when he didn’t follow through after Assad used them.

Unfortunately for the president, such criticism is based on a partial recollection of what happened. After Assad defied him and used chemical weapons, Obama felt pressed to respond. But rather than go ahead with bombing in Syria, with all the risks of getting further drawn into a civil war he was trying to avoid, he took the famous long walk on the White House grounds with his chief of staff, Denis McDonough, to whom he’s said to feel closer than anyone else he works with—other than, of course, the ever-present Valerie Jarrett—and decided to put the issue to Congress by asking its permission to bomb in Syria.
There’s little reason to doubt that he did this in the knowledge that the permission was unlikely to be forthcoming. But the outcome was more felicitous than that. Obama accepted an offer by the Russians to negotiate the removal of the chemical weapons from Syrian hands. Since the Russians are allied with the Syrian government, Obama’s threat seems to have been more credible to Assad than to his American critics.



Another example of Obama fuzzing his declared policy actually concerns supplying weapons to the Syrian rebels. On two occasions—once in 2012, under pressure from Hillary Clinton, CIA Director General David Petraeus, and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta to arm the rebels, and again in June of this year—the president, rather than issuing a formal statement from the White House, had the CIA e-mail halfhearted requests to Congress for relatively small amounts for arms for “moderate” rebels fighting the Assad regime.
Predictably, on both occasions, Republican and Democratic members of the intelligence and foreign relations committees were skeptical, asking such questions as: How do you know whom to give the weapons to, and how does this fit our general policy of not getting drawn into the Syrian civil war? The administration had no good answers, and as the president appeared to hope, only a small and insignificant number of weapons were sent to Syrian rebels.

As when he said “Assad must go,” Obama’s occasional resorting to unsupported rhetoric contributed to the impression of a weak and indecisive leader. The improvised nature of the president’s foreign policy is only partially of his own doing. McCain and Graham notwithstanding, there can be no one-size-fits-all foreign policy now (nor do they represent the views of even the majority of Republicans on Capitol Hill). The disparate nature of the challenges—from Putin’s adventurism to ISIS’s rise—makes it difficult for a president to enunciate a clear, single policy. As Riedel put it, “‘Don’t do stupid stuff’ is as smart an organizing first principle as any.”

 

But it’s the sense of ad hoc policy-making that causes the public to wonder if the president knows what he’s doing. The former defense and foreign policy official Leslie Gelb [above] wrote recently in The Daily Beast:

Mr. Obama always says a lot of smart things…. Much more than most foreign policy blabbermouths, he is attuned to the underlying centrality of politics in most world problems, and to the need to seek diplomatic solutions…. Once there is any kind of crisis, he doles out little pieces of policy daily…. Obama may view this as making sensible decisions in a step-by-step manner. To those trying to understand what he’s doing, they simply can’t follow him, let alone understand how the pieces and the day-to-day changes mesh.

 With rare exceptions, moreover, the sixth year of a presidency is usually one that favors the opposition party. People have tired of the man in the White House. The Democratic pollster Peter Hart says that people have made up their minds about Obama and are unlikely to change them before November. Finally, by various measurements Republicans are more fired up than Democrats about voting this time. This could be the decisive factor in many-to-all of the races.
Though a few of the twenty-nine Republican governorships might change hands, Republicans will still dominate the statehouses; but the rightward trend at the state level has already been blunted, and may be more so as of this election. As of now, at least one Democratic governor, Pat Quinn of Illinois, is seen to be in serious trouble. Illinois’s crisis of overpromised and underfunded pension is the most acute in the country and the state is nearly bankrupt.

In most of the Democratic-controlled states that the Republicans took over in 2010, they adopted the agenda of the pro-business organization ALEC, which included tax cuts, reduced spending, particularly on education, and also model laws for voter ID and relaxed gun control. But John Kasich, the Republican governor of Ohio, for example, wised up and began to move away from this essentially unpopular agenda, and so he is in a strong reelection position. Scott Walker, of Wisconsin, who has demonstrated presidential ambitions, hasn’t been quite as agile and is in a tight race, though his Democratic opponent is at a serious funding disadvantage. The two deeply conservative Republican governors in eastern states—Tom Corbett of Pennsylvania and Tea Party member Paul LePage of Maine—are highly unpopular (Corbett has the distinction of being the most unpopular governor in the country) and widely expected to go down to defeat.
Rick Scott of Florida is in a close race with Charlie Crist, a Republican turned Democrat.



But probably the most interesting governorship race is in Kansas, where the incumbent Sam Brownback [above] gave full vent to his extremely conservative fiscal and social views. Kansas is now deeply in debt. Brownback also tried to purge the more moderate Republicans in his state legislature. This caused over a hundred leading Republicans to oppose him for reelection this year. If Brownback loses, this would confirm that the country simply isn’t ready to be governed by a highly conservative agenda.

But there are reasons to hold back on prognosticating what will happen in November. There’s still plenty of time for an issue to blow up and have an impact on the outcome. In 1980 the race between Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter was quite close heading into the final weekend. Then, going into that weekend, it suddenly became clear that the Iranians wouldn’t release the American hostages then that they had been holding captive for over a year. This failure lit the fuse under a growing frustration with Carter, with the result that Reagan carried forty-four states. Moreover, nine incumbent Democratic senators were defeated in the undertow of the last-minute “wave.” Since the president is on the defensive over a number of issues, his party is more vulnerable to a wave of opposition votes that can still develop at any time up to election day.

One reason for the widespread view that the Republicans would likely take over the Senate is that the election map and math in 2014 favor them. The Democrats have twenty-one incumbent senators up for reelection, several in red or purple states, while the Republicans have fifteen, almost all of them in safe Republican states.



Should the Republicans take over the Senate, then Mitch McConnell, particularly loathed by Democrats for his obstructionist tactics and his wintry personality, would become majority leader. To appeal to the Republican base, McConnell recently said that were he to become majority leader he would favor more government shutdowns—a total reversal of his previous position against them for fear they would hurt his party. As of August, McConnell was facing a stiff challenge by Alison Lundergan Grimes, though he has a record of pulling out victories at the last minute, sometimes with ads that are particularly nasty. But his popularity in Kentucky has hit an all-time low. Of the six Senate seats the Republicans need to pick up in order to capture a majority, three seats held by Democrats who have chosen to retire have for some time been considered by pollsters and analysts to be lost to the Republicans: South Dakota, West Virginia, and Montana. There’s no reason to doubt them on this. In the remaining seven close races where the Democratic incumbent faces a strong challenge or there’s an open seat—Louisiana, Arkansas, North Carolina, Colorado, Iowa, Alaska, and Michigan—the analyses have gone back and forth on how the Democrat is doing. At times Mark Pryor of Arkansas, Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, Mark Udall of Colorado, and Mark Begich of Alaska have been believed to be in peril, only to be resuscitated as “doing better.”



The Democrats’ highest hopes of capturing a previously held Republican seat have been placed on Michelle Nunn, [above] the former executive director of George H.W. Bush’s Points of Light volunteer association and daughter of the popular former senator Sam Nunn. But Michelle Nunn faces another scion of Georgia’s political aristocracy, David Perdue. While the demography of Georgia has been moving toward the Democrats, the most reputable analysts now say that the state hasn’t yet changed enough for a Democrat to win it this year.

Whether or not the Republicans take control of the Senate, the ground there has already shifted to the right. While national Republican officials boast that not one of their incumbents was defeated by a Tea Party challenger—and unlike in the last two elections they had avoided nominating any goofballs (doing so had cost the party six seats)—the victories of what are called “mainstream” Republicans over Tea Party challengers haven’t been without cost to the party’s standing in the next presidential election. For one thing, some of the victories weren’t so thumping as to warrant discounting the Tea Party’s effect on the GOP. In most cases the incumbent had to move to the right in order to prevail.
The Republicans are so uncertain of victory in elections to federal offices that they’re still resorting in several states to passing laws that make voting more difficult for minorities and other groups who would ordinarily vote for the Democrats. Some of these laws are even stricter than those adopted in 2012. Democrats might appear to have issues that could drive their voters to the polls. These would include Republican efforts to deprive women of their own reproductive decisions and opposition to such measures as raising the minimum wage and making unemployment insurance last longer.
Still, largely because of the president’s unpopularity, the Democratic candidates have been having problems finding their voice. Most of their races are focused on the vulnerabilities of their opponents, making for a thus far unedifying election. The result is that a midterm election with national implications so far has no overall national theme.

Unknown at this point is the effect of the unprecedented amounts of outside money being poured into many of the races. It’s estimated that the Kentucky race alone will cost $100 million, the highest amount ever for a state contest. In addition, numerous members of the more militantly liberal Democratic wing have been holding back support of their party’s candidate because of impurities they find in the president’s or candidate’s positions. Democrats “disappointed” in Obama could help elect a Republican Senate. The odds may be stacked against the Democrats this November, but whether they can stave off a loss of control of one half of Congress is still up to them and their would-be supporters.

A Rift in Worldviews Is Exposed as Clinton Faults Obama on Policy

Interviewed by The Atlantic, Hillary Rodham Clinton criticized President Obama’s shorthand description of his foreign policy. Credit Justin Sullivan/Getty Images        
 

N.Y. TIMES

For the 19 months since Hillary Rodham Clinton departed as President Obama’s secretary of state, she and Mr. Obama, and their staffs, have labored to preserve a veneer of unity over how they worked together and how they view the world.

On Sunday, the veneer shattered — the victim of Mrs. Clinton’s remarkably blunt interview with Jeffrey Goldberg, a writer for The Atlantic, in which she criticized not just Mr. Obama’s refusal to aid the rebels in Syria, but his shorthand description of his entire foreign policy.

“Great nations need organizing principles, and ‘Don’t do stupid stuff’ is not an organizing principle,” Mrs. Clinton said, referring to the line that Mr. Obama has used with aides and reporters to describe his reluctance to inject the United States into messy foreign conflicts.

 

Jeffrey Goldberg

 

Mrs. Clinton said she assumed the line was more a “political message” for a war-weary American public than his worldview — an interpretation that makes her words even more stinging, since “Don’t do stupid stuff” was in fact the animating principle for the foreign-policy blueprint that Mr. Obama laid out in a speech at West Point in May.

That Mrs. Clinton is more hawkish than Mr. Obama is no surprise to anyone who watched a Democratic primary debate in 2008. Her policy differences with the president during his first term were well documented, though they were less about underlying strategy than tactics.

She favored supplying arms to moderate Syrian rebels, leaving behind a somewhat larger residual military force in Iraq and waiting longer before withdrawing American support for President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt during the historic protests in Cairo.

What has changed is her readiness to raise those differences to the surface and put them in the context of a different worldview. Even her memoir “Hard Choices,” which she was promoting in her interview with Mr. Goldberg, soft-pedaled the gaps and painted a portrait of her and Mr. Obama in lock step in rebuilding America’s tattered image abroad.

 

Now, though, Mrs. Clinton is suggesting that she and the president hold different views on how best to project American power: His view is cautious, inward-looking, suffused with a sense of limits, while hers is muscular, optimistic, unabashedly old-fashioned.

“You know, when you’re down on yourself, and when you are hunkering down and pulling back, you’re not going to make any better decisions than when you were aggressively, belligerently putting yourself forward,” Mrs. Clinton said to Mr. Goldberg. “One issue is that we don’t even tell our own story very well these days.”

 [But] when Mrs. Clinton says that “the failure to help build up a credible fighting force” against President Bashar al-Assad in Syria “left a big vacuum, which the jihadists have now filled,” the suggestion is that Mr. Obama’s refusal to arm the rebels might end up being a singular misjudgment. But at the time of the Obama administration’s internal debate over that decision, several officials said, Mrs. Clinton’s advocacy was far less thunderous: The United States had tried every diplomatic gambit with Syria, she said, and nothing else had worked, so why not try funneling weapons to the moderate rebels.

As Mrs. Clinton stakes out her own foreign policy positions in advance of a possible campaign for the White House, it is only natural that some of her statements will not be entirely in sync with her record as secretary of state, when she served at the pleasure of the president.

 

In the interview with The Atlantic, Mrs. Clinton said she had always been in the camp of those who believed that Iran had no right to enrich uranium. Yet in December 2010, she was one of the first American officials to acknowledge publicly, in an interview with the BBC, that Iran could emerge from a nuclear deal with the right to enrich.

Mrs. Clinton also lined up solidly with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel — a starkly different position from the first term, when she often had to play the heavy during peace negotiations, chiding Mr. Netanyahu for refusing to curb settlement construction.

 

Even on the Gaza conflict, about which the State Department harshly criticized Israel recently for the number of civilian deaths, she said, “I’m not sure it’s possible to parcel out blame” because of the “fog of war.”

Mrs. Clinton is not the only former cabinet member to part company with Mr. Obama on foreign policy. Robert M. Gates, the former defense secretary, wrote a memoir laced with criticism of the administration’s approach to Afghanistan and other crises.

In an interview with The New York Times in April, Leon E. Panetta, the former defense secretary and C.I.A. director, said of Mr. Obama, “The concern is, the president defining what America’s role in the world is in the 21st century hasn’t happened.”

But Mrs. Clinton is not just any former cabinet member. Because of their long history and Mrs. Clinton’s political future, advisers to her and Mr. Obama have worked especially hard to head off any discord. Her staff gave parts of her memoir to Benjamin J. Rhodes, a deputy national security adviser, for review before publication. And she lunches periodically with Mr. Obama.
 

How well those ties will weather Mrs. Clinton’s latest remarks remains to be seen.